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For my Spanish class Surrealism and Magical Realism, we are currently reading One Hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I highly recommend reading this if you are interested in Magical Realism and Surrealism. Márquez is known for his use of Magical Realism, and within this novel he creates a world in which the supernatural is perceived as reality and the natural (in our minds, the coherent) is thought of as unreal. He writes, “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay” (242).  The progression of time in the face of an evolving conscious helps develop the town of Macundo.  My encounter with this novel got me to thinking about how we must face the unreal to notice the real and how we must face the unconscious to realize the conscious.  In reading Whitman and Márquez at the same time, I have come to see the meaning in questioning our own thoughts.  We analyze what is outside our comfort realm in comparison to what we understand as our own reality.  

The other point that resonated with me from our Thursday discussion was what Professor Grobstein said about incoherence: “things that can derive from incoherence are greater than things that can derive from coherence.”  That which we do not understand (both outside of and within our own realm of thoughts) tends to offer the greatest space for contemplation; increased ambiguity allows for increased analysis. Is the reason we consider the ambiguous/the abstract so ideal because it offers a space for a varied analysis? Does the ambiguous unknown have more to offer than the coherent known? If so, then maybe the drunkard does in fact have more to offer than the sober person.